Windows "figured it out sooner" because it never really had to seriously deal with overcommitting memory: there is no fork(), so the memory usage figures of the processes are accurate. On Linux, however, the un-negotiable existence of fork() really leaves one with no truly good solution (and this has been debated for decades).

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p_ing an hour ago | parent | next [-]

NT has been able to overcommit since it's inception.

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goodpoint 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

fork is a massive feature, not a bug.

	▲	tliltocatl 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		fork() is a misfeature, as is SIGCHILD/wait and most of Unix process management. It worked fine on PDP-11 and that's it. But Linux also overcommits mmap-anonymous/sbrk, while Windows leaves the decision to the user space, which is significantly slower.